


twine

by kamja



Category: Arashi (Band), Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, No Romance, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 17:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6339205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamja/pseuds/kamja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I received a fic exchange request to write Nino and Sho as partner agents. It is based in the Inception universe, though I also drew some inspiration from Ghost in the Shell. The science is very dubious, so please do not think about it too much!</p>
            </blockquote>





	twine

“The Dream Engine?”

Nino held up a small syringe filled with a light blue liquid. The smooth glass glinted in the dim office light. “It’s a nanomachine that arrived on the market about a year ago.”

Sho took the syringe out of Nino’s hand. “And we need this for our next job?”

 

When an architecture student named Ariadne graduated from Ecole D'Architecture forty years ago, brain-enhancing nanomachines injected into the cerebralspinal fluid were just beginning to be developed. They were first used as treatments for stroke patients. Then the military got ahold of them and extended the limits of human ability by creating night vision and closed-network communications. These nanomachines eventually entered the commercial market. It was the beginning of a trend that would result in most of the current adult population using some type of nanomachine on a regular basis.

However, one obstacle remained; none of them allowed the brain to go on the Internet. All prototypes failed or were too expensive for common consumption. Twenty-five years ago, someone had an idea. Small closed-network nanomachines were cheap and widely available. Why not make a new Internet, a closed network large enough for the entire world? It could be achieved by using dream sharing.

It was unclear when she took over the project, but until she disappeared, Ariadne developed this nanomachine. She was originally hired to design the worlds to be loaded into it, but a gap in the records suddenly resumed with Ariadne in full ownership of all the technology. No one knows why she suddenly left behind her work without a trace. A complete prototype was found in her empty lab, fully tested and ready for the market. It was the Dream Engine.

 

“We inject a standard dose, and we’ll fall asleep for twenty minutes,” Nino flipped through a file. “We’ll do recon and if possible, take down the threat. Otherwise, we decide the next move when we wake up.”

“Twenty minutes in real time is one hour in the dream time, right,” Sho replied, looking at a printout Nino shoved under his nose. All government agents received training in shared dreaming. “And there aren’t any projections -”

“Because there isn’t a subject. And besides, all of us are lucid,” someone knocked on the door, and Nino went to answer it.

“And the dreamer...?” Sho pressed. He didn’t like that the department head didn’t debrief both of them at the same time, and instead left it up to Nino to pass the information on. Nino and Sho had always been partners in this agency, despite joining at the same time. It must’ve been someone’s idea of a joke to put the novices together. But that was ancient history. Everyone always thought of them as one unit, and now Sho supposed that telling just one of them something important was enough for the both of them..

“The Dream Engine itself. We’re sharing a dream with a machine.”

It was Jun at the door. He was a senior agent. The conversation seemed to hold dramatic portent, but Jun’s brisk manner sliced through it like a knife. “Did you debrief him?”

“Yup,” Nino sat down in a chair. Sho followed suit. “We’re on ‘need-to-know’, so there’s not much to it.”

“Ok,” Jun picked up one of the syringes in the tray on the desk. “First I’ll put in the Engine, and then I’ll give you the sedative.”

Sho watched as Jun walked around to stand behind Nino’s chair. With one steady hand, he pushed up the hair on the nape of Nino’s neck, exposing the port where all nanomachines needed to be injected. Everyone rushed to get one implanted as soon as they were old enough, a rite of passage into the world of nanomachines. Nino inhaled sharply as the needle went in. Sho was looking down at the printout again, looking over the maps and directives, when suddenly Jun’s cool fingers were on him. The knot in his stomach tightened. There was a prick, and he felt the coldness of the syringe contents flood the back of his skull and spread slowly forward. It was real. He gripped the paper like a totem, feeling the smooth fibers. He didn’t really like trying out new nanomachines. Most of them were pretty fun, but he didn’t like that feeling of lost control.

“I’ll be here,” was the only thing Jun said next, as he measured out a triple dose for three hours of dream time. The Engine, which lasted two weeks before the body naturally excreted it, laid dormant until activated by the special sedative.

Sho opened his eyes and found himself standing in a town square. Nino was right next to him. The square was made of large flagstones, and the buildings resembled those in an old European town. It was noisy and crowded. People stood in groups or mingled around, like a giant cocktail party. Sho noticed others coming in and out of buildings.

“The Engine is mostly social networking and games,” Nino started walking towards the edge of the square. Sho quickly followed. “Can’t really download files...though some libraries have been trying to get their electronic catalogues to dream in here, so people can search.”

"Have you visited before?" Sho asked, looking around him like a tourist. Between the two of them, Nino was the one who kept up with trendy things.

Nino shrugged, an evasive smile creeping over his face. "A couple of times. Not for work, though. A lot of alumni associations are starting to hold class reunions here."

“So then, you could show up here wearing designer clothes while sleeping in Mickey Mouse pjs?” Sho couldn’t help but laugh.

“That’s the plan,” Nino grinned while tugging on his suit jacket sleeve. Sho noticed for the first time that it was much nicer and more expensive-looking than what Nino wore in the office. He looked down at his own clothes, but they were the types of clothes he normally wore.

“Teach me that, when we come back here.”

“Sure,” Nino replied, not really listening as he walked slightly ahead. They stopped in front of a tall, whitewashed building with brown window frames. Sho recognized it from the debriefing file. Some people were inside, playing music. Nino walked around to the side door and opened it, but before Sho could follow, Nino quickly backed out and shut it. Sho thought he heard a moan.

“Of course, nobody’s really here to see old classmates. The sex industry put down roots practically the day after the Engine hit shelves.”

Sho paused and a curious look stole across his face. “What’s it --”

Nino was already walking around to the other side of the building to another door. “This is the one.”

The door opened to a field. Coming from the crowded and lively town square, the quiet rushed at them like a wave. The field was sunny and warm. The center green was mowed, and Sho picked up the faint scent of cut grass. It was lightly populated with kite flyers, people practicing martial arts and couples holding hands. A book club sat in a circle not too far from the door. The field was surrounded by a forest. There was a small dirt path leading into it. Sho paused by the book club.

“What is it?” Nino asked over his shoulder, one foot already on the path.

“Nothing,” Sho lowered his eyes and followed Nino. They walked in silence for some distance. Eventually they came to a tree stump along the left side of the path.

Nino and Sho waited for the hikers ahead of them to go further along. With a look down the path behind them, they took a sharp turn into the forest. The sky darkened quickly, as if a storm just rolled in. The trees grew sparse and straggly, before totally disappearing. Sho checked his watch. They had been in the Engine world for forty-five minutes.

“Is this...” Sho stepped over a pile of crumbling stone. He realized that the plants didn't grow here. They had entered a new area.

“Yeah, this is one of the early worlds that Ariadne abandoned,” Nino replied, looking from side to side. “She uploaded it onto the first prototype, but then redesigned it. The new version was supposed to overwrite this one, but it got only partially erased. As a result, the remnants got copied over to the final Engine.”

It was a desolate place. The cloudless sky was the same shade as the ground. Many of the buildings were missing complete walls, as if a giant sliced them all cleanly away. On the ground, the dust stirred up from their shoes floated around their shins, the physics of the place only partially written. Their target was hiding here, building a virus that the agency needed to stop.

“The file didn’t mention what kind of virus the target is building here,” Sho said, wondering not for the first time at how little the agency told them.

Nino gave a conspiratorial look. “We don’t have the security clearance to know the fine details...but I overheard some conversations between some senior agents. They were talking about inception occurring in the Dream Engine.”

An inception...an idea planted by an outsider in a subject’s dream. It was a theory that had practically become myth. Sure, there were stories. Sho reflected on this. “That’s never been proven. Besides, when we’re here, it’s just one level of shared dreaming. Nothing we see here would count as inception.”

“That’s what I thought too. But think about how nanomachines operate,” Nino shook his head, sniffling. Some of the dust floated up to his nose. 

“All individual nanomachines have a small amount of memory. It’s used for the cache that keeps all the machines and the subconscious synchronized. So now we ask, if a virus...an inception...is uploaded into the Dream Engine through that memory, how would the subconscious react?”

Sho was silent, but Nino continued.

“There’s an old rumor about Ariadne during her school days. Why was she, an architect, recruited to work on the Engine? They say...she had something to do with the Cobb case.”

“And then she suddenly gained ownership of the entire thing,” Sho suddenly said, as if waking up from a dream.

“I wonder what she knew, what she didn’t want anyone else to have,” Nino had a glint in his eye. They had stopped in front of one building that was still intact. He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it.

The room was much larger on the inside than the size of the building from the outside. It was a labyrinth of filing cabinets, shelves and piles of paper stacked on the floors and on desks. Much of it was dusty, though several clean spots on some of the surfaces indicated that someone else was here. Nino and Sho picked their way towards the back. The sound of shuffling paper got louder and louder.

Sho turned the corner around a bookcase, and saw a lanky man ruffling frantically through piles of paper. He recognized the man as their target, a hacker named Carter. He looked up as Nino and Sho approached. His look of shock quickly changed to one of anger.

“Nino! What’re you doing here? You’re messing up the plan!”

“No, Carter,” Nino looked down at the papers scattered on the floor around them. Sho didn’t need to look at him to know that he’d tensed up like a snake before making a strike.

“Wait, you --” Sho attempted to cut in. However, the other two had already rushed at each other.

“You were gonna steal it and hide it for your boss, right?!” Nino pushed Carter, causing him to stumble backwards into a filing cabinet, causing the unit to rattle loudly.

“What the hell are you talking about? How’re we supposed to get anything done with all three of us here?” They were now grappling with each other, stumbling over the papers but not falling down. Sho didn’t know if he should come in and separate them.

“Simple,” Nino pulled a gun from the holster hidden under his jacket. “When you wake up, you can tell your boss that the negotiations have failed.”

The gunshot pierced the air and Carter went flying backwards. He fell on the floor and didn’t move.

“I was assigned to locate Carter undercover in preparation for this,” Nino panted slightly, offering this explanation almost mechanically. He threw the gun aside and started flipping through the papers on the desk. Sho stood there and watched. None of them seemed to be about the virus.

“You won’t find it there,” Sho said quietly at length. “I had it all erased.”

Nino looked up. He seemed to have forgotten all about Sho. “What're you talking about?”

“I saw my aunt in the book club at the field.”

“What?”

“You gave me a sympathy card, remember, after her funeral.”

Nino paled. He let the papers fall from his hand and back on the desk with a slap.

“It was clever, letting my projections populate the world as if they were Engine users. And of course, I wouldn’t think of using my totem.”

Nino shook his head and cursed loudly.

“How long have you been working for them?”

Nino cocked his head and looked thoughtful. He wasn't mocking, but simply honest. "How long have I been your partner?”

Sho couldn’t hide the hurt. He turned to the side so he wouldn't have to look at Nino. They’d worked on countless assignments together. Nino was one of the few people he’d gotten to know from the beginning. Yet he appreciated Nino’s unapologetic manner. “All this time, when you talked about Ariadne and the Dream Engine...”

“Yeah, all this time I knew that you knew her before she disappeared. That you’ve been keeping some of her secrets,” Nino didn’t look at Sho. “I’ve been marking you and waiting for this moment.”

“Is Carter in the next room at our office? Ready to punch you out when you wake?” Sho didn’t want to talk about them anymore. He had to find out about who else was involved.

“Yeah, but Jun--”

 

Sho opened his eyes. He was sitting in the backseat of his car, parked at a supermarket.

The next day, the department head took him into a conference room and quietly asked about the sudden disappearances of Agents Ninomiya and Matsumoto. Sho told her that he didn’t have a clue. He kept turning his totem over and over in his hand, hidden under the table. After work, he drove out of the city and into the north suburbs. The cluttered neighborhoods opened up into shopping malls and subdivisions. He turned into one, taking the twisting one lane road past dog walkers and people washing their cars. There was a small house with a red mailbox in the cul-de-sac at the end.

“They came for it the other day,” Sho said as he sat down on the couch. A dog with pointed ears came up to him and laid her chin on Sho’s knee, begging for a treat. He absently patted the back of her neck. The old woman who lived in this house put some lemonade on the coffee table. She sat down on the armchair across from him. “The secret’s still safe, Ariadne.”


End file.
